Video | Meet the Director - Lessons from a “Spaceship Earth” in the Desert
Join Andy Revkin and guests for an exploration of “Spaceship Earth” – a documentary chronicling the strange and newly-relevant back story of the team of obsessive counterculture entrepreneurs, visionaries and scientists who built and occupied Biosphere 2 – a glass-encased experiment in sustainability in the Arizona desert.
The story resonates afresh as billionaires chart paths to extraterrestrial settlement and strains on the global environment elicit new calls for humans to design an economy that doesn’t overwhelm ecology.
Drawing on more than 700 hours of archival footage, the film’s director, Matt Wolf, has crafted a memorable portrait of an array of characters melding utopian ideals and cultish magnetism in pursuit of a singular dream.
This Earth Institute Sustain What episode is co-sponsored by the Oral History Archives at Columbia, the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory & Empirics (INCITE).
The film, distributed by Neon, was featured at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival just before the pandemic. It is currently streaming on the online video service Hulu. https://neonrated.com/films/spaceship-earth
Guests:
Matt Wolf | “Spaceship Earth” is the fourth feature-length documentary by Wolf, whose previous works range from “Teenage,” an exploration of how the concept of adolescence only emerged in the 20th century to a portrait of Marion Stokes, a woman who obsessively recorded 70,000 cassette loads of television that would otherwise have been erased from history. http://mattwolf.info/
Arminda Downey-Mavromatis came to know the Biosphere through her work as a writer and deputy editor at The Eye, the magazine of the Columbia Daily Spectator. She graduated with a degree in biochemistry from Barnard College in 2020 and is currently an assistant editor at Chemical & Engineering News. Read her feature story on Columbia University’s tenure managing the faltering desert project in The Eye magazine: http://j.mp/biosphere2story
Benjamin Eckersley is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting and Film Directing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Many of his short and feature film projects relate to the intersection of climate change and ecology.
Andrew Golden is a filmmaker, writer, and journalist pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting and Film Directing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Golden has previously worked as a video journalist for Scientific American. https://www.goldenandrew.com/info
Kimberly Springer is Curator for the Oral History Archives at Columbia. Her research, teaching and publishing areas are social movement, cultural studies, born-digital materials, and social media as they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Kimberly’s publications include Living for the Revolution, Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Stories of Oprah: the Oprahfication of American Culture (University of Mississippi Press, 2010). She describes her work here: https://vimeo.com/303308306